First it was necessary to find a place to leave the corpse, ideally in a mountainous area, close to a temple or a stupa. Since time immemorial, the Tibetans had loaded the cut-up bodies of friends and lovers, of masters and disciples, onto the circular path toward the renewal of life. With chants and prayers, they delivered the body of the deceased to the vultures, which devoured it with inhuman and blind piety. With the arrival of death, the soul departed and the body became an empty shell. The final act of worldly generosity was to become food for the birds, a way of turning the wheel of the law and accepting terrestrial impermanence.
Wounded hands which embrace and receive, which wrap up and provide shelter in a devastated world.
And what is it to write a poem, to paint a picture, if not an offering, alms for a stranger? A web of voices / pronounced for no one
The hand is the beginning of giving. All gifts come from the hands: the present for the child, the help for the elderly, the brushstroke and the caress.
So, the work of art is nothing but deduction, subtraction, a way of losing and squandering. Not expecting anything from this gift. Offering the image like a corpse, like the remains of a gesture which once belonged to you; a festival of deprivation, of abandonment. This corpse no longer says anything about you, but feeds others.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
A figure wearing a red tunic loads a pale and helpless being. Their hands are vessels of tenderness. A horizon of fire pursues them. The city burns, disaster is imminent, hope of escape is all that is left. On the other side of the painting, the vultures await.
The vultures are us: the public. Birds of prey which fly in circles over the works —the corpses— that the artist throws onto the pile, still warm with meaning.
The vultures live off these remains of conscience, off this shapeless and rotting thread of life which decomposes on the mountain grass.
Agonizing with attention, the artist says: drink from my blood, feed on my renunciations till hunger earth and sky be offal.
Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool,
or letting the living dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not…
Gabriel Ventura